What is Doc Chat?
Doc Chat is an AI chatbot that lets you ask questions about your documents and get answers with links to the exact places in the text. It works with one or more files so you can understand, review, or extract information without manually searching through pages.
Unlike general chatbots, Doc Chat is built for legal work and is layout-aware. If an answer is something you’d likely insert into your Word document, Doc Chat highlights it and lets you insert it directly while keeping the formatting you already use.
Doc Chat also supports follow-up questions, provides clickable references to source paragraphs, and includes a legal-only filter so it focuses on legal topics and avoids unrelated requests. It’s designed to help legal professionals work faster and stay oriented in their documents.
✅ When to use it
To get quick answers from long or complex legal documents
Ask questions and get concise responses without reading everything.To find the exact section you need
Click references to go directly to the relevant paragraph.To rewrite or draft text inside your document
Insert suggested text into Word while keeping layout formatting.To work with multiple documents at once
Helpful for bundles, transactions, or related files.To stay focused on legal content
Built-in filtering reduces irrelevant or off-topic answers.
❌ When not to use it
When you need fully reliable legal advice without checking
Always verify AI output before relying on it.For non-legal or unrelated topics
The legal filter will block many non-legal questions.
Chat with your document(s)
Doc Chat works much like other generative AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. You ask a question about your document, receive an answer, and can continue with follow-up questions for an ongoing conversation.
What sets Doc Chat apart is that it is layout-aware.
When an answer includes text that is likely intended for insertion into your open Microsoft Word document, it is highlighted in green and can be inserted directly - without needing to adjust formatting or layout.
Doc Chat lets you choose how long you want its responses to be. Before submitting a question, you can select between:
Concise answer – short, to-the-point responses
Medium-length answer – balanced detail (default)
Detailed answer – more thorough explanations
This helps you tailor answers to your task, whether you want a quick confirmation or a more in-depth explanation.
Working with more documents
You can upload one or more PDF files and Word documents using the bottom-right corner. Simply drag the document you want to “interrogate” into the upload area, or select it using your operating system’s file selection dialog.
By clicking on the current document and any uploaded files, you can choose which documents are sent to the AI engine for questioning. Only selected files are visible to the AI.
While uploaded PDFs and Word files can be queried, they are less interactive than the document you currently have open. For example, you can’t click through to specific sections or scroll directly to referenced paragraphs in uploaded files.
For this reason, working with multiple documents is most useful when the files together form a single transaction or a related set of materials.
Tip: If interactive navigation is important, consider combining multiple documents into a single DOCX file using the Bulk Operations module. This takes only a few clicks and allows you to use Doc Chat within the combined document, with full paragraph-level navigation.
Working with selections
ClauseBuddy's chatbot is aware of your current text selection. When you ask it to rewrite the selection, it will take only the paragraphs you selected.
Green and purple background answers
Doc Chat uses different background colours to indicate how answers are intended to be used.
Purple background answers are general responses, such as explanations or clarifications, that are mainly meant for reading. These can be easily copied using the copy button.
Green background answers indicate content that is likely intended to be inserted into your open document or email. These answers include a special layout-aware insertion option, allowing you to insert the text directly into Microsoft Word or Outlook while preserving the existing formatting and layout.
In some cases, you may still want to apply custom styling - for example, to match your organisation’s house style - but for most use cases, the formatting is handled automatically.
Source linking and navigation
Answers often include links to the source paragraphs. Clicking a referenced paragraph takes you directly to that location in the document, allowing you to review the surrounding context quickly.
Good to know
Doc Chat includes a built-in legal filter and will only respond to queries related to legal subject matter (in a broad sense). It will refuse to answer clearly unrelated questions, such as those about sports or pop culture. While there may be edge cases where the filter is either too strict or too lenient, this limitation is intentional and helps ensure that subscriptions are used for professional, work-related purposes.
Tips and best practices
Be explicit in your questions.
Clear, detailed prompts generally produce better results, as the AI can more easily match your question to relevant parts of the document.Ask clearly for insert-ready drafting.
If you want text you can insert directly into your document, explicitly ask the chatbot to write or rewrite content. This increases the likelihood of receiving a green, layout-aware answer.Tell Doc Chat when to look beyond your selection.
By default, the chatbot focuses on your current text selection. If you want it to consider other sections of the document, say so directly.You can often ask questions in a different language than the document’s language.
For easier navigation across multiple documents, consider combining them into a single DOCX file using the Bulk Operations module. This allows you to click and jump between referenced sections more smoothly.
Recommendations and compliance notes
Doc Chat is best for getting oriented and moving faster - but it’s not a substitute for professional judgment. Treat it like a very capable assistant: useful, quick, and helpful, but something you should verify.
For compliance, the document content (split into clauses) is sent to Microsoft’s semantic AI services to generate semantic representations. Microsoft states confidentiality protections. Your data will not be reused in any way, neither by Microsoft, nor by OpenAI.